On a slippery road

Time for remedial action

Soon after taking charge of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, its minister, Kamal Nath, had announced that his target was to build 20 km of highways every day. Given the glacial pace of road-building in the previous five years (the first term of the UPA government between 2004 and 2009 saw an average construction pace of 4 km a day), the new target was ambitious. That it was unrealistic and unachievable is now beyond dispute. The first evidence of that came when almost without anyone noticing it, the ministry scaled down last year’s target to 3,166 km or about 9 km a day. Actual performance last year was worse. Highways construction during 2009-10 was estimated at 2,672 km or about 7 km a day. This may be an improvement over the performance in the previous five years, but there was no solace in the figures for the first six months of 2010-11 when the road-building pace almost halved to 3.7 km a day. Meeting the scaled down target of building 2,500 km of highways (about 7 km a day) in the entire current year is almost impossible and the country’s infrastructure deficit in road transportation is set to widen.

Prospects of an improvement in the pace of construction of highways in the coming months are perhaps better as the government has succeeded in expediting the award of contracts for new road projects. In 2009-10, contracts for only 3,359 km of highways were awarded against a target of 9,806 km. In the first six months of the current financial year, however, the government awarded contracts for 3,051 km of highway projects. This is about one-third of the annual target, but certainly better than last year. This is also creditable because most of these contracts were for public-private partnership projects and, therefore, they had to cross major procedural hurdles, including those that arose out of the complex and time-consuming nature of negotiations. If indeed the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways can come close to awarding the targeted contracts for 9,000 km of roads by March 2011, the pace of construction of new highways during the next financial year may see a significant improvement.

The ministry, however, must exercise caution in awarding these contracts so that there is no compromise with prudential norms of project execution, quality standards and delivery schedules. It need not cite the Planning Commission’s advice on the need to follow transparent and prudent norms for selecting contractors as the reason for delays in decision-making. Instead, it should work towards evolving an efficient and transparent system that addresses the Planning Commission’s concerns. Several other administrative issues come in the way of timely execution of road projects and these need to be addressed as well. There are also regulatory issues that the ministry must come to grips with without any further delay. An independent regulator for highways is certainly as desirable a goal as an early decision on appointing a full-time chairman of the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI). While the regulator can help resolve the many land-related disputes that have stalled many road projects in different parts of the country, filling the leadership void in the NHAI can re-energise an organisation that once played a commendable role in the country’s highway development.